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People tend to take stories literally these days.
Robert Bly
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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Literally
Tend
Days
Stories
Take
People
More quotes by Robert Bly
Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
Robert Bly
Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
Robert Bly
Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.
Robert Bly
The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
Robert Bly
You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.
Robert Bly
The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
Robert Bly
There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
Robert Bly
I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
Robert Bly
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Robert Bly
All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
Robert Bly
Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison they turn to poetry.
Robert Bly
I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
Robert Bly
Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
Robert Bly
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
Robert Bly
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.
Robert Bly
